معصومه خیرآبادی

This article aims to study mental spaces in Persian children stories within a cognitive linguistic framework. As a new branch of the linguistics, cognitive linguistics was established in 1970s. In this approach, language is considered as a reflection of thought, and studying language patterns maps conceptualization. Cognitive linguistics is distinguished from the other branches of the discipline by the presupposition that language represents fundamental features and the detailed mapping of human mind. The main purpose of this study is to find mental structures and fundamental concepts on which Persian authors of children books base their stories. To conduct the research, data was gathered through library resources and, from a corpus of fifty children stories, five stories were accidentally selected and analyzed descriptively within Gilles Fauconnier’s (1997) mental spaces framework. Findings show that base space in the selected stories is constructed on the concept of “Loneliness” and presupposes that being trapped in loneliness is a problem with endless pain and sorrow. In other words, loneliness has been represented as a negative concept so that the next mental spaces be distanced from it. Stereotypically, fictional characters face this problem involuntarily, try to get out of it, and finally gain victory. The works under study in this research contain the message of collectivism and philanthropy, and the created mental spaces lead children audience to a sense of empowerment in social relations. The findings of this study can be useful both for authors and editors of children stories.

Under hyperglycemic conditions, inflammatory processes with damage to the peripheral nerves are involved in the occurrence of neuropathy. This study aimed to compare the anti-inflammatory effects of metformin (synthetic drug) with gallic acid (natural compound) in hyperglycemic conditions.

Hyperglycemia was induced in male rats by the intraperitoneal injection of Streptozotocin (STZ) at a dose of 60 mg/Kg. For this research, rats were divided into four groups. Two groups were healthy control and hyperglycemic control rats that did not receive any drugs. The other two groups were hyperglycemic rats, which respectively received Metformin at a dose of 300 mg/kg/day and gallic acid at a dose of 40 mg/kg/day. At the end of the 8-week period, the rats in all groups were anesthetized and a sample of their sciatic nerve was taken to measure the expression level of genes related to pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-1β and TNF-α. Data analysis was done by SPSS software and comparison between average data was done by one-way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc test.

Induction of hyperglycemic conditions in rats increased the expression of genes related to pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-6 (p=0/000), IL-1β (p=0/008) and TNF-α (p=0/005). However, administration of metformin and gallic acid to hyperglycemic rats for 8 weeks reduced the expression of IL-6, IL-1β and TNF-α genes (p˂0.05).

Gallic acid, like metformin, with its anti-inflammatory properties, can be effective in improving complications caused by hyperglycemic conditions, especially neuroinflammation, and it is hoped that it will be clinically useful for diabetic patients in the future.

Investigating fake news has a long history, almost as old as the history of media. This issue has recently returned to the attention of researchers. Since the raw material of all types of news is linguistic content, the characteristics of fake news from the linguistic point of view have recently been the focus of linguists. In this research, which is descriptive-analytical in terms of methodology and library-type in terms of data collection, based on the framework proposed by Grieve and Woodfield (2023), we investigate the linguistic features of fake news, in a corpus of 100 advertising text messages. Data have been selected from the Persian language pages of Telegram and Instagram social messengers in the fall and winter of 1402. The purpose of this research is to investigate the linguistic components of fake news in social messengers. The analyzed corpus includes messages that are specifically classified as cases of disinformation against misinformation. The 7330- word corpus of this research, includes messages that are apparently intended to inform and advertise, but actually to deceive the audience on popular social media pages and channels. The results showed that these types of messages are instances of low-density messages in terms of information density, but high-conviction texts in terms of conviction. The findings of this research can lead to the deepening of linguists' insight into the linguistic mechanisms of fake news (especially misinformation) and ultimately lead to an increase in the awareness of the audience of such media and messengers.

Hyperglycemia is associated with decreased activity of antioxidant enzymes and damage to peripheral nerves. The present study aimed to compare the antioxidant and analgesic effects of gallic acid (a natural compound) with metformin (a chemical drug) in hyperglycemic conditions.

Hyperglycemia was induced in male rats by the intraperitoneal injection of Streptozotocin (STZ) at a dose of 60 mg/Kg. For this research, rats were assigned to four groups. Two groups were healthy control and hyperglycemic control rats that did not receive any drugs. The other two groups were hyperglycemic rats, which respectively received metformin at a dose of 300 mg/kg/day and gallic acid at a dose of 40 mg/kg/day. At the beginning of the 8-week period for all groups, every two weeks, hot-plate and tail-flick tests were taken, and at the end of the period, the rats were anesthetized, and their blood test was performed to measure the activity of antioxidant enzymes. Data analysis was performed in SPSS software using one-way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc test.

The administration of metformin and gallic acid in hyperglycemic rats for eight weeks increased the pain threshold and the activity of the antioxidant enzymes catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) (P<0.05).

Gallic acid, like Metformin, can be effective in the improvement of complications caused by hyperglycemic conditions. Therefore, gallic acid may have a clinical application in the treatment of diabetic patients in the future.

In most of the communication situations power of actors determines the types of social relations and impacts on their speech actions. Like any other types of discourses, power relations are also observable in children’s stories and specify the way characters interact each other. The research problem is to identify types of such relations and their dioscourse goals in children’s stories. The main objective of this study is to explore mental models corresponding to power relations playing roles in shaping these texts. To acheive this objective, linguistic strategies regarding to power relations among actors are analyzed within socio-cognitive discourse analysis of Van Dijk (2000). This research is a descriptive-analytical one and 30 stories are selected purposefully after studying a corpus of 100 Iranian Children’s stories for A,B,C age groups in Persian. Findings have demonstrated that the mental model applies to generate Iranian Children’s stories conforms the flat power relations, solidarity and equality cliché among the actors and doesn’t legitimize the superior-inferior hirearchy. This type of cliché reflects the social viewpoint of Iranian speackers to power beholders. Educational planners, authors, translators and book editors may find the results beneficial.

The primary purpose of this research is to study cultural cognition and conceptualizations in Persian stories published for children. The problem of research is to determine which cultural conceptualizations are embedded in the texts of Persian children’s stories.  The methodological approach taken in this study is based on cultural linguistics. According to Sharifian (2017) cultural linguistics is based on the premise that many aspects of human languages encode cultural conceptualizations. In other words, cultural conceptualizations are embedded in many features of human languages. Cultural linguistics offers both a theoretical and an analytical framework to investigate the cultural conceptualizations underling the human languages in practice. The theoretical framework of cultural linguistics contains the notion of “cultural cognition”, which affords an integrated understanding of the notions of “cognition” and “culture” and the way these two concepts are related to language. This analytical framework provides some useful tools that allow us to examine features of human languages which encode conceptualizations and to analyze the relationship between language and cultural conceptualizations. They contain the three major notions of “cultural schema”, “cultural category”, and “cultural metaphor”.  By cultural schemas we mean a culturally constructed subclass of “cognitive schemas” that are an invention of the cognitive sciences. Cultural schemas, which may in some cases encompass subschemas, are instantiated in many aspects of language. Sharifian (2014) believes that cultural schemas capture pools of knowledge that provide the basis for a significant portion of encyclopedic and pragmatic meanings in human languages. Additionally, they provide substantial foundation for the “common ground” i.e., the knowledge shared, or assumed to be shared, by the members of a speech community. Cultural schemas (and subschemas) include beliefs, norms, rules, and expectations of behaviour as well as values relating to various aspects and components of experience. Members of a cultural group negotiate and renegotiate these schemas and pass them onto later generations. According to Shore (1996), cultural schemas may be instantiated through the use of language, in painting, rituals, and even in silence. Various levels and units of language such as morphosyntactic features, lexical items, speech acts, idioms, metaphors, discourse markers, etc., may be established in cultural schemas. Aspects of language that mainly draw on cultural schemas may expedite intra-cultural communication, while debilitating intercultural communication. Within a cultural group, the communication, which is based on cultural schemas, involves a much more fluid transfer of messages and yields more homogeneous interpretations than the communication which is based on idiosyncratic, individual-based schemas. This research introduces fundamental cultural schemas in the Persian childrens’ stories within cultural linguistics analytical framework and analyses the determined schemas within metalinguistic discourse method which is developed by Sharifian and Tayebi (2017a, 2017b).  For their analysis of perceptions of (im)politeness in Persian, Sharifian and Tayebi developed an innovative three-tier model consisting metadiscourse analysis level, discourse analysis level, and conceptual analysis level. Metadiscourse analysis focuses on identifying words or expressions frequently used by those participating in interactions describing (im)polite acts. In discourse analysis level, they identified the scenarios that had led to evaluations of (im)politeness. Eventually, in conceptual analysis, they examined the nature of the relationship between the perception and evaluation of (im)politeness and the impliciting cultural conceptualizations, as well as the ethnography of related cultural conceptualizations. Some of these may remain unobserved by the interactants in the course of communication. The statistical sample of this research consisted a corpus of 100 Persian stories published for children of A and B age groups (6-10 years old) during the time span of 1998-2018. Fifty-two interactions have been found in these stories among the characters. Thirty-one cultural schemas showing various cultural themes are identified by putting the interactions of the stories’ characters within analytical framework of cultural linguistics. The findings indicate that three major macro schemas of sympathy, taa’rof (Iranian art of etiquette) and sense of regret have shown some repetitive schematic patterns which are themselves closely related to sub-schemas of cooperation, freedom seeking, hospitality, formality, and embarrassment. Silence plays an indispensible pragmatic role in macro-schema level and a considerable number of verbal interactions of the stories’ characters are closely influenced by this metalinguistic element. Micro schema of solitariness is also embedded within macro schema of sympathy and regret. This consequently has had remarkable effect on verbal and nonverbal interactions of characters. The present study makes several noteworthy contributions to the elicitation of some of cultural schemas in Persian language. These schemas are reflected in common social interactions of children stories. They also enrich the literature relating to children stories. The evidence from this study, mainly the new list of schemas, will serve as a base for further probes in sociological and anthropological studies.

Exposure to estrogen like chemicals during critical periods of development particularly in the neonatal period can disrupt normal patterns of mammary tissue development later in life. In this study, the effects of neonatal exposure of tamoxifen anti-estrogen and zearalenone mycoestrogen on some histological characteristics of mammary gland in female mouse were investigated.
Twenty newborn female mice of BALB/c strain were divided into four groups: three experimental and one control group (with no treatment). Treatment groups included Tamoxifen (400 μg /kg /day) group, Zearalenone treatment group (2 mg /kg /day) and group treated with tamoxifen췦꭪垧ꉷ treatment group. Daily treatments were started on the first day of life and continued up to 5 subcutaneously. Then about 70 days after birth, mice were deeply anesthetized and the mammary tissue was removed from the body. Following histochemical staining, the samples were studied using light and transmission electron microcopies.
Findings: The result showed that epithelial thickness of milk duct and volume of the nipple in tamoxifen treatment group significantly (pDiscusion & The results of this study show that neonatal administration of tamoxifen probably exerts anti-estrogenic effects and it prevents the normal development of mammary tissue, but zearalenone do not have adverse consequences on mammary tissue.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), an approach rooted in critical linguistics movement of 1970s, is a fruitful framework for analyzing journalistic discourse and crystalizing power and ideological relations behind the media. News analysis has been known as one of the most frequent trends within CDA. In this article, a new theoretical framework for news analysis, known as evaluative semantics (White, 2006), has been introduced. This framework is essentially a semantic one and influential in analyzing news from a new perspective. In this research, besides introducing the above-mentioned model, a sample news text taken from the Washington Post about Iran’s nuclear dossier has been analyzed. The main aim of this research is to study major features of this framework and to scrutinize the potential value it adds to CDA analysis of news texts. Therefore, it is recommended that evaluative semantics model (White, 2006) is competent in adding new areas of research into media analysis within CDA general approach, considering features such as affect, judgment and appreciation in news texts , and clarifying some hidden aspects of media products. The findings of this research can be both inspiring for CDA researchers and unveiling some linguistic and semantic aspects of Western media against Iran’s nuclear dossier. Considering the growing prominence of CDA in text analysis, introducing new trends such as one represented in this article can pave the way for further studies.

The uterus as the major female reproductive organ is particularly vulnerable to environmental and hormonal like compounds. Exposure to estrogen like disrupting chemicals during critical periods of development especially in the neonatal period can have adverse effects on reproduction and fertility later in life. In this study, the effects of neonatal exposure of mycoestrogen zearalenone and anti-estrogen tamoxifen on some histological characteristics of the uterus in female mice were investigated.
Material and 28 newborn female mice of BALB/c strain were divided into four groups (n=7): three experimental and one control group. Treatment Groups included Tamoxifen (400 μg /kg /day) group, group treated with zearalenone (2 mg /kg /day) and group treated with tamoxifen zearalenone. Control mice received no treatment. Daily treatments was started first day of life and continued up to 5 subcutaneously. Then about 70 days after birth in diestrous stage of estrous cycle, mice were deeply anesthetized and uterus was removed from the body. Following histochemical staining, the samples were studied using light and transmission electron microcopies.
The result of this study showed that in between the treatment groups, body weight decreased significantly (P>0.05) in group which received Tamoxifen, compared with control group. Uterus weight increased significantly in Zearalenone group (P>0.05) and Tamoxifen Zearalenone group (P>0.01). Endometrial thickness increased significantly (P>0.05) in group which received Tamoxifen and decreased significantly (P>0.05) in group which received Zearalenone. In addition, myometrial thickness decreased significantly (P>0.05) in group which received Zearalenone compared with control group. The study of electron microscopy showed that the number of cells of uterine luminal epithelial structure increased in the group treated with Tamoxifen compared with control group.
The result of present study indicates that neonatal administration of Tamoxifen and Zearalenone compounds cause histological lesions in uterus structure. Because of the estrogenic nature of zearalenone, the treated neonatal mice with this mycotoxin cause structural abnormalities especially in myometrial structure. On the other hand, Tamoxifen as an estrogenic agonist cause endometrial thickness increase and alterations in the uterus.

The present study scrutinized news stories of Persian-language newspapers within Mental Spaces theory. The concept of ‘Mental spaces’ was initially introduced by Fauconnier (1985). It was consequently developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) into a model entitled ‘Conceptual Integration Theory’. Mental Spaces theory assumes that meaning is not simply pre-existing stored knowledge encoded by language; rather, it is a consequence of its usage in the context; as a result, it is possible to trace mental spaces created by authors based on linguistic features and relations among particles. In the present descriptive-analytical study, six news stories excerpted from two Persian daily newspapers, which reflected the same theme and event from different perspectives, were analyzed. The findings showed that news editors utilize different mental spaces to impose their opinions and beliefs on their audiences and to lead the news flow to a direction on which the base space, namely newspaper headline, has been based. The findings of this study can be applied to newspaper discourse analyses.

Generally the news stories of daily newspapers do have their own narrative style; they coherently explain an event within a framework of some sentences or a paragraph. Headlines, as utterances with special structural features, which do not necessarily provide the sentence structure and generally lack the coherence element have a prominent role in the process of news production and broadcasting. As all the syntactic relations in the level of a sentence are defined by the verb, the role of the verb in construction of a well-formed syntactic sentence is of great importance. However, it seems that in headlines the verb absence is more common than its presence. From a critical discourse analysis (CDA) perspective, absence of one element or change in the structure is a reason of ideological intentions. Considering the linguistic features of news discourse will pave the way to do research about the presence or absence of verbs in headlines and its relative discursive justifications. This is a descriptive-analytic study of selected headlines from prominent Iranian daily newspapers. Sampling of the data is conducted through a systematic accidental approach from three Persian language morning newspapers. This study showed that 65.15 percent of headlines lack a verb. This number is statistically meaningful and shows some discursive intentions.

While writing a literal or educational text, especially for children, it is very important to know the characteristics of the readers. Children’s literature and educational professionals believe that using difficult vocabulary or structures in a text will eliminate the reader’s motivation, so using simple structures and core vocabulary is very important. Core vocabulary means a list of words that have high frequency in use, and everyone (in an age level) can understand their meaning. In this research, we study the usage of core vocabulary in 20 texts from “Roshde Noamuz” magazine according to Nematzade et al (2011). The results of this research can be fruitful in writing and translating childrenʼs texts. We further aim to find vocabulary that all Iranian children can understand its meaning to use in literal and educational texts.

Tissue engineering is based on three main factors including scaffolds، cells and growth factors. Natural scaffolds derived from decellularized tissues and organs have been successfully used in tissue engineering. Decellularization studies have shown that natural scaffolds which maintaine their main structure and properties could be a suitable tool for studying cellular behaviors and preparation of such scaffolds is an important part of future research in biology that may have extensive applications in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Blastema tissue which is produced after injuries in some organisms has embryonic cell characteristics، and can be a suitable model for evaluation of cell behaviors in various tissues. In this review، the process of decellularization، process involved in preparation of 3D scaffolds derived from extracellular matrix of various tissues including cartilage، bone، gingiva، aorta and bladder، and assessment of their interactions with blastema tissue under in vitro conditions are discussed.

In its simplest definition, literacy means obtaining the ability to read and write in official language. Although most students try to get mastery on the two mentioned language arts; however, for students of non-Farsi speaking districts, education of Farsi as an official language has more limitations and difficulties. In the process of learning a second or foreign language, errors are considered as natural phenomena. Error Analysis (EA) is a method for indentifying educational needs in order to improve the quality of materials and techniques of education. Error Analysis means the comparison of sentences (written or oral) produced by learners with the sentences of native speakers according to their adjustment/non-adjustment with rules of language under study. In this research, written errors of non-Persian speaking students (Turk students learning Farsi as a second Language) of the intermediate and advanced levels have been analyzed. The body of the data were gathered from the letters and manuscripts of Iranian students writing to Roshd magazines and they were described and analyzed using descriptive method. They contained 100 error items which were categorized in four groups: orthographic (spelling), morphological (Lexical), structural and pragmatic errors. The aim of this research was finding the most frequent errors in the writing of non-Persian speaking Iranian students. The results showed that the most frequent type of errors is structural one (containing 72% of all the errors). In other words, Iranian non-Persian speaking students generally do have more problems and deficiencies in application of Persian grammatical rules in their writings. Consequently material developers and textbook authors should pay more attention to this finding especially while developing textbooks and educational aids for this group of students.